The Ohio State University and the Willi Hennig Society have just announced this summer's Workshop in Phylogenetics Indoctrination in Cladistics Workshop. Some twenty students will receive fellowships to attend this workshop from the Willi Hennig Society. With these fellowships, students will be able to receive four days of instruction on the proper use of outdated methodologies for only $600. On the fifth day, the workshop will make a foray into the 21st century with a lecture on model based phylogenetics and a laboratory on the use of RAxML, Garli and MrBayes. Instruction on model-based methods will be provided by Dr. Christopher Randle, whose only publications on Bayesian methods are critiques (1, 2) and whose recent publications rely either exclusively on parsimony (3) or give preference to parsimony over maximum likelihood when the two methods are largely congruent (4). I'm sure Dr. Randle is an excellent scientist, but his presence as the sole instructor of model-based methods suggests that this workshop is going to be about as balanced as Fox News.
